Bethesda deny Fallout 76 free-to-play rumour

Bethesda have denied a rumour that Fallout 76 is preparing to go free-to-play. Launched in November 2018, their multiplayer survival sandbox scored a ‘noncommittal, wavy gesture of the hands and forearms accompanied by an exclamatory exhalation’ out of 10, a score further lessened by bugs and leaking personal information and bugs and skimping on the £175 edition. While the rumour was based on hearsay and assumption, it rang true to enough people to rocket down the information superhighway.

“There is no truth to this rumour,” Bethesda said simply on Twitter last night in response to one player’s question. Yeah but they would say that, wouldn’t they? Ipso facto it’s going F2P QED lorem ipsum, Frankenstein.

The rumour, as relayed by SegmentNext, was based largely on a supposed mystery source at Australian retailer EB Games saying the distributor was recalling copies. As rumours go, it’s hardly concrete, but it still whizzed around the Internet and was taken as fact by many. A lot of rubberneckers and schadenfreude-seekers want the mess of Fallout 76 to get even worse.

The game is very ‘noncommittal, wavy gesture of the hands and forearms accompanied by an exclamatory exhalation’, to be clear. As Nate Crowley said in our Fallout 76 review, “Fallout 76 feels like an atavistic reprisal of a late-2000s MMO. Worse yet, with its low server populations and absence of human NPCs, it’s as if it’s designed to feel like a dying late-2000s MMO.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s already going free-to-play. Even if it does already have the microtransactions you’d expect in a free-to-play game. God, it really is such a ‘noncommittal, wavy gesture of the hands and forearms accompanied by an exclamatory exhalation’ game.